The Railway Man: Why Nicole Kidman's sleeping partner is so familiar

By Baz Bamigboye

PUBLISHED: 18:18 EST, 7 March 2013 | UPDATED: 02:54 EST, 8 March 2013

Nicole Kidman is on her second marriage ... to Colin Firth.

The Oscar winner was repeating a mirthful line from her co-star. She is, of course, on her second marriage, and very happily so, to country star Keith Urban.

She and Firth play real-life married couple Eric and Patti Lomax in The Railway Man, a film about World War II POW Lomax.

The two actors are also shooting the intense psychological thriller Before I Go To Sleep, with Firth as Nicole's husband and Mark Strong as a doctor treating her character for amnesia.

Nicole Kidman

Colin Firth

A second marriage: Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth star as a married couple in not one, but two films - The Railway man and Before I Go To Sleep

'Colin said we're on our second marriage now, and it's true, but this is a very different marriage than our first,' Nicole said darkly. 'Before I Go To Sleep is a psychological thriller, my favourite genre. I'm making the kind of film I like to watch.'

She was full of praise for writer-director Rowan Joffe, who has turned S.J. Watson's novel of the same name into a tight, spare, edge-of-your-seat suspense.

'I like directors who are daring and take chances,' she added. 'The films are sometimes experiments. I'm at a time of my life where I don't have to play by the rules and I can work with visionary f! ilm-makers who aren't making formulaic films. I want to be tested beyond my comfort zone. I don't want to be safe if it's more interesting to be dangerous.'

She certainly doesn't play by the rules in Stoker, which is currently on release. Nor does she in Lee Daniels's Southern shocker The Paperboy, which opens here on March 15.

In Stoker, she's the mother from hell with a daughter who turns out to be a real bad-ass and an over-attentive brother-in-law, played by Matthew Goode.

Busy lady: Actress Nicole Kidman stars in new release Stoker and Lee Daniels's The Paperboy which opens in the UK March 15

Busy lady: Actress Nicole Kidman stars in new release Stoker and Lee Daniels's The Paperboy which opens in the UK March 15

The film, directed by Chan-wook Park, was made a while back but was released last week. It's dark, twisted and wicked.

'It's not formulaic,' added Nicole, laughing.

While Nicole is filming Before I Go To Sleep in London, with her two youngest children - daughters Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret - in tow, husband Keith Urban is back in the U.S. working on a new album and shooting American Idol, on which he is a judge.

'Keith comes and goes,' said Nicole. 'He'll fly in for 24 hours just to say hello and give us all a hug, or he might stay a couple of days. He's busy over in Nashville and LA. But once I've finished filming, I'm going to be the wife by his side because it's family time.

'I love it that he's crazy enough to get on a plane and come over here for 24 hours. But that craziness is rooted in a love and a friendship for each other. The friendship is just as important as the love, and it builds over time. I know how lucky I am.'

We were speaking in London just over a week after we'd talked on the Oscar red carpet, where Nicole wore a gown designed for her by L'Wren Scott ! (left). S! he described the dress as having 'all the bells and whistles for men' as opposed to wearing a gown that was 'all fashiony' and would appeal more to women.

'You know what you men like in a dress, and that's what I wore. It was for Keith,' she said.

Making his Broadway debut: Actor Tom Hanks will star in Lucky Guy written by Nora Ephron

Making his Broadway debut: Actor Tom Hanks will star in Lucky Guy written by Nora Ephron

Hanks is a lucky, just like me!

Tom Hanks was smart to pick a new play, and not some revival, to make his Broadway debut.

He was smart, too, to choose one written by Nora Ephron, a piece she was writing up until her death last June.

The play is called Lucky Guy and ostensibly it's a portrait of an American journalist by the name of Mike McAlary.

He was a big noise in New York from the mid-Eighties through the Nineties, before the internet was the force it is now, writing columns about crime for the New York Daily News and the New York Post, and some of what he wrote made a helluva difference.

But it's also an elegy for a time when reporters went out and reported the news. Now, for the most part, they sit in front of computers and rewrite it.

'There are no stories in the newsroom. Get your butt into the street. Smell the blood and taste the sweat,' declares Hanks's McAlary.

After a while, Hanks (pictured) just disappears and becomes McAlary.

Lucky Guy, directed by George C.Wolfe, is also about how a journalist works his contacts, many of them police officers.

Not only did Ephron write the best new U.S. play I've seen in an age, but also, unwittingly, a drama that declares loud and clear why reporters need unfiltered access to contacts, whether they be police officers, lawyers, politicians or whoever.

One got the distinct sense that Lord-Justice L! eveson an! d his Press standards inquisitors understood very little about what journalists do. It would do him no harm to redeem his Air Miles and scoot over to the Broadhurst Theatre on West 44th Street in Manhattan to see Lucky Guy. It may well come to the West End, but Leveson should see it now.

McAlary, by the way, isn't painted as some saint. By all accounts, he wasn't the nicest guy in the world, but he loved his job.

Towards the end of the play, McAlary declares: 'I have lived the life I dreamed about.'

That touched a deep chord because I have, too.

Dervla Kirwan told me she's 'honoured' to be the only girl in the Donmar Warehouse Theatre's revival of Conor McPherson's play The Weir.

It begins rehearsals on Monday, with Josie Rourke directing Dervla, Brian Cox, Peter McDonald, Risteard Cooper and Ardal O'Hanlon. It's about four friends sharing a round in a rural Irish pub when they're joined by Valerie, a newcomer.

'She's an incredibly wonderful mixture of intense fragility and great courage,' said Dervla of her character, but all will be revealed when The Weir opens on April 18.

It will be followed at the Donmar by McPherson's new play, The Night Alive, which he'll direct from June 13.

Meanwhile, Dervla's filming her final scene in the movie Silent Hour, as a police officer hunting a serial killer. One of her co-stars is her real-life mother-in-law Angela Thorne.

Hugh Bonneville will no doubt bring a touch of aristocratic class to his duty of co-hosting the Olivier Awards show alongside Sheridan Smith.

The actor, who stars as the Earl of Grantham in Downton Abbey (even Daniel Day-Lewis, who dissed the show recently, likes it really), will take charge of Olivier proceedings at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on April 28.

The ceremony will be broadcast on ITV - the first time the awards are being given serious ! network e! xposure. Nominations will be revealed on March 26.

Lynda Bellingham will be walking on air as the star of Kay Mellor's play A Passionate Woman. Sheffield Theatres artistic director Daniel Evans told me Ms Mellor has slightly re-written her 17-year-old play about a woman coming to terms with the men in her life.

And to his delight, she has relocated the play to Sheffield. 'I'm always happy when Sheffield's put front and centre,' Evans said, adding that the theatre's current hit show, The Full Monty, was also 'allowed to come home to Sheffield' where it's set.

Ms Bellingham will reunite with her All Creatures Great And Small leading man, Christopher Timothy.

Peter McMillan is also in it, and Ms Mellor will direct her own work in Sheffield from September 10 until September 21, after which the drama will go on a nationwide tour.


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